Professor Ken Lohmann completed his term as President of the International Sea Turtle Society by presiding over the 2019 International Sea Turtle Symposium in Charleston, South Carolina. The symposium is the premier annual event in global sea turtle biology and conservation and attracted more than 850 participants from 52 countries. The theme of the symposium was Navigating the Future. The symposium featured more than 400 oral and poster presentations and 25 workshops, as well as special sessions on Genetics and Genomics, Navigation and Natal Homing, The Future of Sea Turtle Conservation, and Using Science to Inform Conservation.
Kayla Goforth, a Biology graduate student (Lohmann Lab), was runner-up for the Archie Carr Award at the 2019 International Sea Turtle Symposium in Charleston, South Carolina. The Carr Award is given for the best oral presentation on sea turtle biology. Kayla’s talk, titled “Formation of Foraging Site Attachment in Migratory Sea Turtles”, described experiments revealing that captive loggerhead turtles that are fed in a magnetic field characteristic of a specific coastal location can learn to recognize that field and associate it with food. The results provide insight into how turtles learn the locations of particular foraging sites and can navigate to them across hundreds of miles of open sea.